The Well Trained Mind is not the sort of book that lends itself to quoting, so I won’t. It is, however, an extremely practical guide to homeschooling, with specific advice for each year, from pre-K through highschool, including information on how to write highschool transcripts, grades, and prepare your kids for the academic paperwork portion of applying to college. It is a kind of homeschooling reference book. (There are multiple editions online; I purchased the one in the photo because it was cheaper than the newer ones, but you might want the most recently updated one.)

By now I’ve probably read about a dozen books on homeschooling/education, everything from Montessori to Waldorf, Summerhill to Unschooling, math and science curriculum guides for preschoolers, and now The Well-Trained Mind.

The data on homeschooling is pretty good: homeschoolers turn out, on average, about as smart as their conventionally schooled peers. (I forget the exact numbers.) They tend to be better than average at reading and writing, and a bit worse than average at math and science. Unschooled kids (who receive very little formal instruction in anything,) tend to turn out about a year behind their peers, which isn’t too bad considering all of the effort that goes into conventional schooling, but I still can’t recommend it.

The Well-Trained Mind is an excellent staring point for any parent trying to get their feet under themselves and figure out the daunting task of “OMG How do I do this?” It lays out a subject-by-subject plan for every year of schooling, down to how many minutes per day to spend on each part of the curriculum.

If that sounds too detailed, remember that this is just a guide and you can use it as an inspirational jumping-off-point for your own ideas. It’s like arranging all of the colors of paint in a nice neat circle before you paint your own masterpiece.

If you need a curriculum–either because your state requires it, or it requires you to cover certain topics, or you would just feel better with a curriculum to guide you before you leap in unsupervised, this is a very good guide. If you already have your curriculum and you feel secure and confident in what you’re doing, you might find the information in this book superfluous.

Bauer and Wise lay out what’s known as the Trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Elementary school is the “grammar” stage. At this age, students are learning (mostly memorizing) the mechanical rules they need for education, like letter sounds and times tables. At the logic stage, children begin applying what they know and trying to figure out why things happen. Rhetoric is for the highschoolers, and since I don’t have any highschoolers I didn’t read that part of the book.

The curriculum for the younger grades is straightforward and easy to use: 10 minutes a day of alphabet/phonics for the preschoolers, increasing over the years to include spelling, grammar, reading, and math. The authors particularly encourage reading history (they have a specific order) and children’s versions of classic novels/myths.

Their approach to writing is interesting: in the lower grades, at least, children do very little generative writing (that is, coming up with and writing down their own ideas,) and focus more on copy work–trying to accurately and neatly write down a few sentences their parents give them, and otherwise expressing themselves out loud.

This stands in stark contrast to how writing is taught in the local schools, where even kindergarteners are expected to start writing little stories or at least sentences of their own devising.

This works great for some kids. My kids hate it. I think the combination of tasks–hold the pencil properly, now form the letters, arrange them into a word, spell the word properly, oh, and come up with an original idea and a specific sentence to write about the idea was just overwhelming.

So Bauer’s approach, which breaks the mechanics and creative work into two different parts, is a welcome alternative that may work better for my family.

Bauer and Wise are strong advocates of phonics instruction (which I agree with) and make an interesting point about emphasizing what they call parts-to-whole instruction and avoiding whole-to-parts. In the example they give, imagine giving a child a tray of insects (presumably fake or preserved,) and showing them five different kind of insect legs. The child learns the five kinds, and can then sort the insects by variety.

Now imagine handing the child the same tray of insects and simply asking them to take a good look at the bugs, figure out what’s the same or different between them, and then sort them. Well, children certainly can sort objects into piles, but will they learn much in the process? Let the children know what you want from them, teach them what you want them to learn, and then let them use their knowledge. Don’t expect them to work it all out on their own from scratch with a big pile of bugs.

I’ve noticed that a lot of children’s “educational” TV shows try to demonstrate the second approach. The characters have some sort of problem and the try to think about different ways to solve it. This is fine for TV, but in real life, kids are pretty bad at this. They struggle to generate solutions that they haven’t heard of before–after all, they’re only kids, and they only know so much. This doesn’t mean kids can’t have great ideas or figure stuff out, it just means they have sensible limits.

This is the same idea that underlies their approach to phonics–not that it’s wrong to memorize a few words (sew does not rhyme with chew, after all,) but that kids benefit from explicit instruction in how letters work so they can use that knowledge to sound out new words they’ve never seen before.

Whole language vs. phonics instruction isn’t quite the controversy it used to be, but there’s something similar unfolding in math, as far as I can see. Back in public school, they didn’t teach the kid the “algorithm” for addition and subtraction until third grade. My eldest was expected to add and subtract multiple two-digit numbers in their HEAD based on an “understanding of numbers” instead of being taught to write down the numbers and add them.

Understanding numbers is great, but I recommend also teaching your kids to write them down and add/subtract them.
AND FOR GOODNESS’S SAKES, WRITE EQUATIONS VERTICALLY. Always try to model best practice.

Many kids acquire number sense through practice. Seeing that 9+5=14 whether they are in the equations 9+5 or 5+9, 45+49 or 91+52, helps children develop number sense. Give children the tools and then let them use them. Don’t make the children try to re-invent addition or force them to use something less efficient (and don’t teach them something you’ll just have to un-teach them later.)

The authors recommend teaching kids Latin. I don’t recommend Latin unless you are really passionate about Latin. IMO, you’re better off teaching your kids something you already speak or something they can use to get a job someday, but that’s a pretty personal decision.

Here’s how our own schedule currently looks:

After all of the holiday excitement and disruption, I feel like we’re finally settling back into a good routine. What exactly we do varies by day, but here’s a general outline:

2 Logic puzzles (I’m not totally satisfied with our puzzle book, so I can’t recommend a specific one, but logic puzzles come in a variety of difficulty levels)

2 Tangram puzzles (I like to play some music while the kids are working)

1 or 2 stories from Mathematicians are People, Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians (Warning: Pythagoras was killed by an angry mob, Archimedes was killed by an invading soldier, and Hypatia was also killed by an angry mob. But Thales and Napier’s chapters do not have descriptions of their horrible deaths.) This is our current “history” book, because I try to structure our history around specific themes, like technology or math.

Science and/or social studies reading (the subjects often overlap.) I happened across a lovely stack of science, math, and social studies texts at the local used book shop the other day. When I got home, I realized they’re from India. Well, math is math, no matter where you’re from, and the social studies books are making for an interesting unit on India. In science we’ve just started a unit on Earth science (wind, water, stones, and dirt) for which I am well-prepared with a supply of rocks. (Come spring we’ll be growing plants, butterflies, and ladybugs.)

Free reading: my kids like books about Minecraft or sharks. Your kids like what they like.

Grammar/spelling/copywork: not our favorite subjects, but I’m trying to gradually increase the amount we do. Mad Libs with spelling words are at least fun.

One of the nice things about homeschooling is that it is very forgiving of scheduling difficulties and emergencies. Everyone exhausted after a move or sickness? It’s fine to sleep in for a couple of days. Exercises can be moved around, schedules sped up or slowed down as needed.

This week we finished some great books (note: I always try to borrow books from the library before considering buying them. Most of these are fun, but not books you’d want to read over and over):

I suppose the moral of the story is that kids are likely to enjoy a biography if they identify with the subject. The story starts with Erdos as a rambunctious little boy who likes math but ends up homeschooled because he can’t stand regular school. My kids identified with this pretty strongly.

The illustrations are nice and each page contains some kind of hidden math, like a list of primes.

Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, by Dominic Walliman. This is a lovely book appropriate for kids about 6-11, depending on attention span and reading level. We’ve been reading a few pages a week and recently reached the end.

Minecraft Math with Steve, by Steve Math. This book contains 30 Minecraft-themed math problems (with three sub-problems each, for 90 total.) They’re fairly simple multiplication, subtraction, division, and multiplication problems, probably appropriate for kids about second grade or third grade. A couple of sample problems:

Steve wants to collect 20+20 blocks of sand. how much is that total?

Steve ends up with 42 blocks of sand in his inventory. He decides that is too much so drops out 12 blocks. How many blocks remain?

A bed requires 3 wood plank and 3 wools. If Steve has 12 wood planks and 12 wools, how many beds can he build?

This is not a serious math book and I doubt it’s “Common Core Compliant” or whatever, but it’s cute and if your kids like Minecraft, they might enjoy it.

We are partway into Why Pi? by Johnny Ball. It’s an illustrated look at the history of mathematics with a ton of interesting material. Did you know the ancient Greeks used math to calculate the size of the Earth and distance between the Earth and the moon? And why are there 360 degrees in a circle? This one I’m probably going to buy.

Really Big Numbers, by Richard Evan Schwartz. Previous books on “big numbers” contained, unfortunately, not enough big numbers, maxing out around a million. A million might have seemed really good to kids of my generation, but to today’s children, reared on Numberphile videos about Googols and Graham’s number, a million is positively paltry. Really Big Numbers delivers with some really big numbers.

How Big is Big? How Far is Far? by Jen Metcalf. This is like a coffee table book for 6 yr olds. The illustrations are very striking and it is full of fascinating information. The book focuses both on relative and absolute measurement. For example, 5’9″ person is tall compared to a cat, but short compared to a giraffe. The cat is large compared to a fly, and the giraffe is small compared to a T-rex. My kids were especially fascinated by the idea that clouds are actually extremely heavy.

Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, by Joseph D’Agnes. If your kids like Fibonacci numbers (or they enjoyed the biography of Erdos,) they might enjoy this book. It also takes a look at the culture of Medieval Pisa and the adoption of Arabic numerals (clunkily referred to in the text as “Hindu-Arabic numerals,” a phrase I am certain Fibonacci never used.) Fibonacci numbers are indeed found all over in nature, so if you have any sunflowers or pine cones on hand that you can use to demonstrate Fibonacci spirals, they’d be a great addition to the lesson. Otherwise, you can practice drawing boxes with spirals in them or Pascal’s triangles. (This book has more kid-friendly math in it than Erdos’s)

Pythagoras and the Ratios, by Julie Ellis. Pythagoras and his cousins need to cut their panpipes and weight the strings on their lyres in certain ratios to make them produce pleasant sounds. It’s a fun little lesson about ratios, and if you can combine it with actual pipes the kids can cut or recorders they could measure, glasses with different amounts of water in them or even strings with rock hanging from them, that would probably be even better.

Older than Dirt: A Wild but True History of Earth, by Don Brown. I was disappointed with this book. It is primarily an overview of Earth’s history before the dinosaurs, which was interesting, but the emphasis on mass extinctions and volcanoes (eg, Pompeii) dampened the mood. I ended up leaving out the last few pages (“Book’s over. Bedtime!”) to avoid the part about the sun swallowing up the earth and all life dying at the end of our planet’s existence, which is fine for older readers but not for my kids.

You may have noticed that I talk a lot more about math than reading or writing. This is not because I dislike the language arts, but because they are, once learned, not very complicated. A child must learn to decode symbols, associate them with sounds, and then write them–tricky in the beginning, but most children should have the basics down by the age of 6 or 7. For the next several years, the child’s most important task is simply practice. If a child has a book they love to read, then they are already most of the way there and will probably only need some regular instruction on spelling and punctuation.

Math, by contrast, is always advancing. For every new operation or technique a child masters, there is another waiting to be learned.

I don’t hold with the idea that mathematical concepts must be taught in a particular order or at particular ages–I introduced negative numbers back in preschool, they’ve learned about simple logarithms in elementary, and they seem none the worse for the unusual order.

Developmental sequence is fundamental to children’s ability to build conceptual understanding. … The chapters in this book present math in a developmental sequence that provides children a natural transition from one concept to the next, preventing gaps in their understanding. …

When children are allowed to explore many objects, they begin to recognize similarities and differences of objects. When children can determine similarities and differences, they can classify objects. When children can classify objects, they can see similarities and difference well enough to recognize patterns. When children can recognize, copy, extend and create patterns, they can arrange sets in a one-to-one relationship. …

This developmental sequence provides a conceptual framework that serves as a springboard to developing higher level math skills.

This logic is complete bollocks. (Count on Math is otherwise a fine book if you’re looking for activities to do with small children.)

Humans are good at learning. It’s what we do. Any child raised in a normal environment (and if you’re reading this, I assume you care about your children and aren’t neglecting them) has plenty of objects around every day that they can interact with, observe, sort, classify, etc. You don’t have to dedicate a week to teaching your kid how to tell “similar” and “different” in objects before you dedicate a week to “classifying.” Hand them some toys or acorns or rocks or random stuff lying around the house and they can do that themselves.

Can you imagine an adult who, because their parent or preschool skipped straight from”determining similarities and differences” to “making patterns,” was left bereft and innumerate, unable to understand fractions? If the human mind were really so fragile, the vast majority of people would know nothing and our entire civilization would not exist.

More important than any particular order is introducing mathematical concepts in a friendly, enjoyable way, when the child is ready to understand them.

For example, I tried to teach binary notation this week, but that went completely over the kids’ heads. They just thought I was making a pattern with numbers. So I stopped and switched to a lesson about Fibonacci numbers and Pascal’s triangle.

Then we went back to practicing addition and subtraction with regrouping, because that’s tricky. It’s boring, it’s not fun, and it’s not intuitive until you’ve really got base-ten down solid (base 10, despite what you may think, is not “obvious” or intuitive. Not all languages even use base 10. The Maya used base 20; the Babylonians used base 60. There are Aborigines who used base 5 or even 3; in Nigeria you’ll find base 12.) Learning is always a balance between the fun stuff (look what you can do with exponents!) and the boring stuff (let’s practice our times tables.) The boring stuff lets you do the fun stuff, but they’re both ultimately necessary.

What else we’ve been up to:

Fractions, Decimals, and Percents, by David A. Adler. A brightly-colored, well-written introduction to parts of numbers and how fractions, decimals and percents are really just different ways of saying the same thing.

It’s a short book–28 pages with not much text per page–and intended for young children, probably in the 8 to 10 yrs old range.

I picked up Code Your Own Games: 20 Games to Create with Scratch just because I wanted to see what there was outside the DK Workbooks (which have been good so far, no complaints there.) So far it seems pretty similar, but the layout is more compact. Beginners might feel less intimidated by DK’s larger layouts with more white space, but this seems good for a kid who is past that stage. It has more projects than the shorter DK Workbooks but they’re still pretty simple.

We had a lovely, windy day, so we grabbed the kites, invited the neighbors, and headed out to the park.

Homeschooling does put additional responsibility on the parents to help their kids socialize. That doesn’t mean homeschooled kids are necessarily at a disadvantage viz their typically-schooled peers when it comes to comes to socializing (I went to regular school and still managed to be terribly socialized;) it’s just one more thing homeschooling parents have to keep in mind. So I am glad that we’ve had the good luck recently to make several friends in the neighborhood.

I’ve been looking for good, educational YouTube channels. Now I haven’t watched every video on these channels and I make no guarantees, but they seem good so far:

The Usborne Times Tables Activity Book is a rare find: a book that actually makes multiplication vaguely fun. Luckily there’s no one, set age when kids need to learn their multiplication tables–so multiple kids can practice their tables together.

In math we’ve also been working with number lines, concept like infinity (countable and uncountable,) infinitesimals, division, square roots, imaginary numbers, multi-digit addition and subtraction, graphing points and lines on the coordinate plane, and simple functions like Y=X^2. (Any kid who has learned addition, subtraction, multiplication and division can plot simple functions.)

If you’re looking for board game to play with elementary-aged kids, Bejeweled Blitz is actually pretty good. Two players compete to place tiles on the board to match 3 (or more) gems, in a row or up and down. (A clever play can thus complete two rows at once.) We play with slightly modified rules. (Note: this game is actually pretty hard for people who struggle with rotating objects in their heads.)

Picture Sudoku is fun for little kids (and probably comes in whatever cartoon characters you like,) while KenKen and magic squares and the like are good for older kids (I always loved logic puzzles when I was a kid, so I’d like to get a book of those.)

I’ve found a website called Memrise which seems good for learning foreign languages if you don’t have access to a tutor or know somene who speaks the language you want to learn. They probably have an app for phones or tablets, so kids could practice their foreign langauge on-the-go. (Likewise, I should stow our spelling book in the car and use car rides as a chance to quiz them.)

And of course we’re still reading Professor Astro Cat/working in the workbook, which involves plenty of writing.

For Social Studies we’ve been reading about fall holidays.

Hope you all have a lovely October! What are some of your favorite educational videos?

I happened to have a poop-shaped pinata sitting around (Why? Look, sometimes these things just happen) of the pull-the-flap-on-the-bottom variety rather than the smash-it-with-a-bat kind, so I decided to add a little fun to our day by filling Mr. Poop with school-related ideas written on strips of paper. Give Mr. Poop a shake and a scrap of paper flutters out–today’s idea was to design your own game, which the kids are working on now.

I’ve decided to incorporate the Cub Scout handbooks–which have lots of useful information about subjects like first aid, water safety, civics, history, etc.–into our rotation. (The Cub Scouts have a different handbook for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders.) Today we learned about knots–mostly square knots–complemented with The Camper’s Knot Tying Game. Knots are practical for anyone, but also good practice for kids with fine motor difficulties.

Over in Professor Astro Cat, we’re collecting space dust, keeping a moon journal (the eclipse was well-timed for this) and made impact craters in the sandbox. The book recommends spreading out newspaper indoors and using flour or cocoa powder, but sand, outside, is much easier to clean up. (Walmart sells beautiful colored sand for like $4 a bag. I sprinkled some green on top of the regular brown sandbox sand to simulate Earth’s surface.)

Custom Dice

There are lots of interesting dice–math dice, fraction dice, letter dice, place value dice, etc. Customized dice are easy to make: just take a cube (you probably have a building block or letter cube or some Legos lying around,) cover it with paper, and write whatever you want on the faces. (Note it is probably best to write on the paper before applying tape, as many pens won’t write properly on tape.) I have a custom die with +,-, <, and division signs on it that I use along with custom “numbers larger than six” dice for math games. (“Looks like you rolled 5,000,000,000 divided by 7,000!”) (For smaller kids, you may want to stick to + and -.)

I’m still trying to work out good ways to teach history. I’ve got some rudimentary ideas, but I’ll save them for later.

Many years ago, I worked at a toy store. (It was a lot of fun–I like feeling helpful.) One day I was helping a grandmother pick out a gift for her young granddaughter, a 6-month old whom she proudly informed me was really at the developmental level of a 9-month old. She asked me to recommend something “educational” for the child.

Being, (I confess) not very good at this, I responded in confusion that pretty much everything is educational for a baby. Babies are learning all the time.

One of my co-workers helpfully jumped in and found her a stuffed dog that’s supposed to help babies learn to read.

Many years and a great deal of IQ and education research later, I stand by my original position: “educational” toys for babies probably aren’t. It would be great if we could find some magical technique–say, playing Classical music to your fetus–that could reliably make people into geniuses, but so far we haven’t actually found any.

Does that mean you shouldn’t play Classical music to your fetus? Of course not. There’s no evidence that Classical music hurts babies. It’s just highly likely that being the kind of person who would play Classical music to your fetus is a bigger factor in how your kids turn out than the actual music. But if you hate Classical, don’t sweat it.

If you’ve been hanging around the HBD-osphere for a while, you probably already know that adult IQ appears to be about 50% genetic and 50% random chance. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to teach your kids things (you should definitely teach your kids things.) It just means that it’s more important to be good and kind to your kids than to buy them any particular toy or splurge on baby genius classes.

Anyway…

The youngest child has been really into rocks and crystals lately; at this age, they’re still fascinated by freezing cups of water to make ice. A little food coloring (rainbow ice!) fresh mint leaves, flowers, whatever you want to add makes the ice extra interesting; add salt for a lesson about icebergs and the ocean. I don’t know if this is really educational, but it’s fun.

The rest of our time has been focused primarily on regular old rote material–times tables, multi-digit addition and subtraction, handwriting, typing, spelling, etc. Luckily these skills are pretty flexible and so can be taught to multiple kids at different levels. Competitive multiplication games (try to call out the answer first!) work well in our household.

We also learned about If-Then statements in code and the Apollo 11 moon landing, which resulted in them coding a short animation about the moon launch.

I do hope that once I feel a little more secure about their basic skills, we can move outside for some active learning/PE/map-making type activities.

I’m a really boring person who gets excited about finding math workbooks at the secondhand shop. I got lucky this week and snagged two math and 1 science workbooks, plus Bedtime Math 2 at the library. Since new workbooks/manipulatives/materials can be pricey,* I’ve been keeping an eye out for good deals for, well, pretty much my kids’ whole lives. For example, a few years ago I found Hooked on Math ($45 on Amazon) at Goodwill for a couple of bucks; I found some alphabet flashcards at a garage sale for 50c.

I’m also lucky to have several retired teachers in the family, so I’ve “inherited” a nice pile of teaching materials, from tangrams to fractions.

*That said, sometimes you need a particular workbook now, not whenever one shows up at the second hand shop, so thankfully plenty of workbooks are actually pretty cheap.

But full “curriculums” can be pretty expensive–for example, Saxon Math plus manipulatives runs about $200; a Lifepack 4 or 5-subject curriculum is about $320; Montessori math kit: $250; Horizons: $250. I have no idea if these are worth the money or not.

So I’m glad I already have most of what I need (for now.)

This week we started typing (I went with the first website that came up when I searched for “typing tutor” and so far it’s gone well.) We finished Bedtime Math and moved on to Bedtime Math 2. (We’re also working out of some regular old math books, as mentioned above.)

In science we’re still reading Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space (today we discussed eclipses,) and we started Professor Astro Cat’s Intergalactic Workbook, which has been fun so far. It has activities based on space gloves, weightlessness, Russian phrases (used on the International Space Station,) Morse Code, etc.

(The gloves activity was difficult for youngest child–in retrospect, one pair of glove would have been sufficient. Eventually they got frustrated and started using their feet instead of hands to complete the activities.)

Professor Astro Cat has therefore been the core of our activities this week.

To keep things light, I’ve interspersed some games like Trucky3, Perplexus, and Fraction Formula. They’re also useful when one kid has finished an activity and another hasn’t and I have to keep them occupied for a while.

Coding continues apace: learned about loops this week.

Spelling is one of our weak points, so I want to do at least some spelling each day, (today we spelled planets’ names) but I’m not sure what the best approach is. English spelling is pretty weird.

Welcome! Highly unscientific polling has revealed an interest in a regular or semi-regular feature focused on homeschooling.

Note that I am NOT some homeschooling guru with years of experience. We are just beginning, so I want some other people to discuss things with. I don’t have a curriculum picked out nor a coherent “philosophy,” but I am SO EXCITED about all of the things I have to teach I couldn’t even list them all.

I was thinking of starting with just a focus on what has been successful this week–which books/websites/projects we liked–and perhaps what was unsuccessful. I invite all of you to come and share your thoughts, ideas, questions, philosophies, recommendations, etc. Parents whose kids are attending regular schools but want to talk about learning materials are also welcome.

One request: Please no knee-jerk bashing of public schools or teachers. (I just find this really annoying.) Thoughtful, well-reasoned critique of mainstream schooling are fine, but let’s try to focus on the homeschooling.

Like many parents, I thought it’d be useful to learn some basic coding, but have no idea where to start. I once read HTML for dummies, but I don’t know my CSS from Perl, much less what’s best for kids.

After a bit of searching, I decided to try the the DK Coding with Scratch series. (This particular workbook is aimed at kids 6-9 yrs old, but there are others in the series.)

Scratch is a free, simple, child-friendly coding program available online at https://scratch.mit.edu/. You don’t need the workbook to use Scratch, (it’s just a helpful supplement.) There are also lots of helpful Youtube videos for the enterprising young coder.

Note: my kids really want to code because they want to make their own video games.

In general, I have found that toys and games that claim they will teach your kids to code actually won’t. (Eg, Robot Turtles.) Some of these games are a ton of fun anyway, I just wouldn’t expect to become a great coder that way.

I’m still trying to figure out how to do hands-on science activities without spending a bundle. Most of the “little labs” type science kits look fun, but don’t pack a lot of educational bang for your buck. For example, today we built a compass (it cost $10 at the toy store, not the $205 someone is trying charge on Amazon.) This was fun and I really like the little model, but it also took about 5 minutes to snap the pieces together and we can’t actually carry it around to use it like a real compass.

Plus, most of these labs are basically single-use items. I like toys with a sciency-theme, but they’re too expensive to run the whole science curriculum off of.

Oh, sure, I hand them a page of math problems and they start squawking at me like chickens. But bedtime rolls around and they’re like, “Where’s our Bedtime Math? Can’t we do one more page? One more problem? Please?”

There are only three math problems every other page (though this does add up to over 100 problems,) the presentation is fun, and the kids like the book better than going to sleep.

The book offers easy, medium, and hard problems in each section, so it works for kids between the ages of about 4 and 10.

There’s an inherent tension in education between emphasizing subjects that kids are already good at and working on the ones they’re bad at. The former gives kids a chance to excel, build confidence, and of course actually get good at something, while the latter is often an annoying pain in the butt but nevertheless necessary.

Since we’ve just started and are still getting in the swing of things, I’m trying to focus primarily on the things they’re good at and enjoy and have just a little daily focus on the things they’re weak at.

I’d like to find a good typing tutor (I’ll probably be trying several out soon) because watching the kids hunt-and-peck at the keyboard makes my hair stand on end. I’d also like to find a good way to hold up workbooks next to the computer to make using the DK books easier.